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Juvenile justice conferences missing targets: report

ELEANOR HALL: Back home now and throughout the 1990s, state governments around the nation developed a new way to deal with young people who find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

They diverted many of them into restorative justice programs, programs where offenders are forced to face their victims and the damage they've caused.

Today, the Australian Institute of Criminology released a report which raises concerns about the large number of 10- to 14-year-olds being diverted into the programs.

The Institute's research analyst, Dr Kelly Richards spoke to Ashley Hall about the programme.

KELLY RICHARDS: I guess my main concern about them at this stage, and that came out of this piece of research is that they're not perhaps being used to the extent that we hoped they might and not perhaps being used in the ways that we hoped that they might.

ASHLEY HALL: Well explain for me, back track a little bit, and explain for me what exactly restorative justice is and what it was supposed to do.

KELLY RICHARDS: Sure. So restorative processes take lots of different forms, the most common form is something that we call 'youth justice conference.' So that brings together a young offender who's admitted guilt to an offence, usually with members of his or her family or other supporters and also the victim of the offence.

And it brings them together in a sort of facilitated forum. And the young person's really held to account, if you like, for that offence. The victim gets the opportunity to tell their side of the story and to let the young offender know how their life's been impacted.

So these sorts of processes were introduced for a range of reasons but one of the key reasons was to try to divert young people from the more formal criminal justice system and to some extent to keep young people out of detention.

ASHLEY HALL: And in your study you've discovered that the vast bulk of cases heard in this manner, or dealt with in this manner, relate to property crimes. Did that surprise you?

KELLY RICHARDS: A little, yes. I mean on one hand it's not surprising given that the bulk of crimes committed by young people tend to be property crimes.

But I guess in another way that was a little bit of a disappointing finding given that, firstly, we know that a lot of those cases don't end up with the young people being detained anyway, so perhaps restorative measures could be used for more serious offences committed by young people, if their purpose is to keep young people out of detention.

And secondly that there's a really robust body of evidence that shows that restorative processes are more effective when they're used for more serious offences, so that they're more effective for youth violence than they are for property crime.

ASHLEY HALL: You've also found that younger people are quite heavily represented in this and girls, particularly are quite heavily represented in restorative justice programs. Perhaps overly represented compared to their, the incidence of crime that they're engaged in. What concern does that raise for you?

KELLY RICHARDS: Yeah, well this raises a really key concern.

So what we found, based on the available data which I should say are quite limited at this stage so these are quite preliminary findings, was that restorative processes seem to be used, more than we would have thought, for very young juveniles.

So juveniles sort of aged between 10 and 14 rather than those 15- to 17-year-old, you know slightly older, bit more serious offenders, and about even proportions of young girls and young boys are sent to these processes. And again that was a little bit surprising given that young males are more likely to commit crimes and they're more likely to commit more serious crimes.

So the key thing here is that it would appear that restorative processes are simply, you know, we'd call them a net widening process, so the net of social control, if you like, has been widened to include those younger juveniles and female juveniles when really the intention was, perhaps, to deal with the harder end and to deal with the slightly older, predominantly male juveniles, who are committing more serious offences.

ELEANOR HALL: That's Dr Kelly Richards, a research analyst at the Australian Institute of Criminology, she was speaking to Ashley Hall about the Institute's report of restorative justice.